The False Gods by George Horace Lorimer was illustrated in 1906 by a young J.C. Leyendecker. It is not mentioned in any of the reference books on Leyendecker.
1906 was an interesting moment for the world's perception of ancient Egypt. 19th century colonial exploration had revealed-- but not solved-- many of the intriguing mysteries of that fabled empire. The discovery of King Tut's tomb, which sparked the international Egyptian craze, was still 16 years away.
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| The Riddle of the Sphinx by Elihu Vedder (1836) |
Books such as The False Gods filled in gaps between the the initial speculations and the archaeological facts. Without photographs or scientific evidence, the public had to rely upon the imaginations of artists. Illustrators were the George Lucases and the Steven Spielbergs of their day, inventing the images for an insatiable public and shaping their fantasies.
In 1906, Howard Carter was an unemployed artist who had traveled to Egypt inspired by books. He first found work copying tomb decorations. During long stretches of unemployment, he supported himself by painting watercolors which he sold to tourists. He wandered around the Valley of the Kings searching for ancient tombs and eventually became a bona fide Egyptologist.
Funded by British Lord Carnarvon, in 1922 Carter stumbled upon one of the most famous Egyptian archaeological discoveries of all time, King Tut's tomb.
In an era before television or the internet, illustrated books like this one served as a stepping stone to all kinds of explorations and achievements.
6 comments:
That Vedder is awesome.
Indeed MORAN, the Vedder got my attention too!
Paintings of old ruins were very trendy, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries because they made viewers think about mortality and the sadness of life. These scenes enable us to ruminate on feelings of melancholy, especially scenes where grass had grown over ancient cities and simple shepherds now tended their flocks over places where kings had reigned and rich men once seemed invincible. Lorraine, Poussin, Coccorante and others did very well with ruined castles, abbeys, prisons, etc. going as far back as Greece or Rome.
But the thing that distinguished Vedder's painting and the other Egyptian pictures was that Egypt went back a thousand years before the legends of Greece and Rome and whatever occurred back in Egypt was way beyond our comprehension. The rubble left behind in the desert freaked people out. The Sphinx remained silent.
I've only seen this book in its digitized version on Hathitrust. This book's illos and content was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post earlier that year. The cover was earlier the cover to the January 27, 1906 issue of SEP.
I'm not a huge fan of his individual illos for this particular story. But Leyendecker's interior magazine illustrations at this time in general were astonishing, especially where the content is somewhat supernaturally related Expertly combining any number of different ancient civilizations' decorative designs, patterns, and symbolisms into his otherwise realistic work. (I'll send you along a selection if you wish). All of which seem to have that awesome tectonic decorative quality that defined the fin de siecle period. Which forcefully distinguished it from the floridity of nouveau. (Of course, Leyendecker could do Nouveau as well.)
His method of incorporating ancient design styles directly into the fabric of the picture is, in my opinion, much more beautiful, effective and dynamic than the Orientalist's use of ancient objects of art as evocative touchstones. The former revitalizes these ancient visual ideas so they live again in all their mysterious power. Whereas the latter method embalms them in a kind of museum like environment with a curatorial sensibility. (Walter Everett's similarly brilliant incorporated use of the ancient design ideas was surely due to Leyendecker's lead.)
I wonder if anybody in the history of art had such a command of ancient styles as he did.
Kev Ferrara-- Excellent catch. I know that Redbook, Cosmopolitan and other magazines repackaged illustrated serial stories in the form of cheap books in the '20s but I had no idea the Post did the same thing, especially as early as 1906.
I compared the quality of the reproduction of the Post cover with the quality of the book cover, and the magazine was far superior. Leyendecker could not have been pleased. The Post was really just inexpensively recycling their content to squeeze an extra few bucks out of it (author Lorimer being the editor of the Post and all).
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